Knstlers in Paradise

(Hardback)

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Description

Julian Knstler comes from New York City to L.A. like many a lost twenty-something: to find a job writing in the entertainment industry. But this is 2020 and his temporary visit turns into an extended stay, trapped by the lockdown in a little house in Venice with his glamorous, eccentric, and ancient grandmother. Ninety-three-years old, Mamie came to Los Angeles from Vienna at eleven with her parents in 1939 among a wave of Jewish musicians, directors, and intellectuals escaping Hitler. As the months roll on, she begins to tell Julian her stories of the eminent emigres she's known and the magical world they inhabited as their old world was destroyed-people like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, and Greta Garbo. Not quite all her stories, however. The pandemic isolates Julian from his world, but from Mamie he learns of the world that came before him and how much the past holds of the future. A tender, sharply wrought comic novel about exile, the power of stories handed down and handed on, and the power of stories held secretly in the heart. Cathleen Schine's writing has been hailed as "sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious and deeply affecting" by the New York Times, and those qualities stand out more than ever in Knstlers in Paradise. Here, Schine weaves together the story of a family of Jewish migrs just after they fled from Vienna to LA in the 1930s and life in the pandemic to craft a beautiful, often humorous examination of the identities we inherit and assume and what it means to be displaced. Knstlers in Paradise is the coming-of-age story of a indecisive young man coming into his own and his eccentric, worldly grandmother as they both discover that history does not end.

Reviews

A People Magazine Book of the Week

"A moving and entertaining novel about how we revisit memories to make meaning for ourselves and others. . . . Ms. Schine has a wonderful ability to weave research and substantive ideas into her novels without weighing them down. Her buoyant dialogue has the zip of great comedy routines."
--Wall Street Journal

"Schine's delight in language is contagious--she offers up words like baubles, turning them this way and that to catch the light. . . . A paean to the regenerative power of storytelling and to Los Angeles itself."
--Kim Hubbard, New York Times Book Review

"Knstlers in Paradise is a tender family story, but it is also a profound meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, inheritance, and legacy, the malleability and perdurability of memory."
--Boston Globe

"Dreamy, drifty, and droll, studded with lush botanical description and historical gems. Schine's many fans will enjoy."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Reading like a cross between Leopoldstadt and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, this does the trick as an emotionally resonant meditation on family, memory, and the need for stories."
--Publishers Weekly

"Few authors could pull off what Cathleen Schine does in Knstlers in Paradise: creating a seamless, multilayered saga about family dynamics and relationships, immigration, the early days of Hollywood and the often disturbingly cyclical nature of history. . . . Knstlers in Paradise is truly a trove of unexpected rewards."
--BookPage, Starred Review

Author Bio

Cathleen Schine is the author of The Grammarians, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, and The Love Letter, among other novels. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.